MegaHELL

For a local shopping trip my nearest mall is the appropriately named MegaMall, which leaves you in no doubt as to the scale of it. It is a prime example of riduculous town planning which allowed it to be constructed in the middle of a spaghetti junction-esque merging of main routes around the city. So not only does this roundabout have to cope with traffic in and out of the mall but also any traffic to and from all surrounding areas. The jams here strike fear in the heart of even the most muscled clutch-controller.

Once you have negotiated the snarled up traffic you then need to find somewhere to park. On Tuesday this took 45 minutes. The cars crawled around the airless underground carpark, beeping, revving and cutting each other up. In the middle of a total sense of humour failure I headed towards an exit (who needs christmas presents anyway?) when I spotted a space under some pipes and squeezed the beast in. Admittedly it wasn't an official carparking space but beggars can't valet park.

Our shopping list was brief:
Christmas candy for the kids
Jusco vouchers for our TA's and cleaners
A get well pressie for the poorly Ed

In and out in half an hour? Not a hope.

The book store lady headed off to find the book we were looking for only to disappear into the ether. The CD shop had a great collection of Malay classics but not the album we wanted. A wealthy customer had just purchased the last 10,000 rm of Jusco vouchers. The usually slow malay walk had deteriorated into a slither and I was not finding any of it amusing.

Finally, with rumbling belly, parched mouth and a pounding head we managed to make our escape a mere three hours later. No wonder this place has been dubbed Megahell.